Editorial Team

Silicon Canals Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Silicon Canals Editorial Team produces content across our three editorial pillars: technology and business, power and investigations, and human systems. We chronicle the systems that shape our lives, from the global infrastructure of technology to the internal infrastructure of the human mind. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, sourcing, drafting, fact-checking, editing, and review, rather than a single journalist's writing. Silicon Canals takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

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Technology

The Murchison meteorite that fell on an Australian town in 1969 contains grains of stardust 7 billion years old, meaning the dust predates the Sun itself and is the oldest solid material ever held in a human hand

In 1969, a fireball broke over the Victorian town of Murchison and scattered carbon-rich stones across the paddocks. Inside them sat grains of silicon carbide that condensed in dying stars roughly 7 billion years ago — older than the Sun, older than the Earth, and the most ancient solid material ever held in a human hand.

Jun 17, 2026

Technology

Fujitsu engineers could remotely alter subpostmaster accounts without their knowledge — and the Post Office told courts for years that they couldn’t

For fifteen years, the Post Office told courts that Horizon's branch accounts could only be altered by the subpostmaster at the counter. Fujitsu engineers in Bracknell could rewrite them remotely — and the denial of that capability is the load-bearing beam under more than 700 wrongful prosecutions.

Jun 16, 2026

Curiosities

A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, once the longest single flash ever recorded and roughly the distance from New York City to Columbus

On 29 April 2020, a single lightning bolt crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi end to end — 768 kilometres of continuous discharge in under seven seconds, the longest flash ever recorded. Here is what scientists now know about how such megaflashes start.

Jun 16, 2026

Technology

In December 2024, Google announced that its Willow quantum computing chip had completed a calculation in roughly five minutes that would have required the world’s fastest classical supercomputer approximately 10 septillion years — longer than the current age of the universe by a factor of approximately a quadrillion — in what Google’s quantum AI team called a demonstration that the chip had entered a ‘beyond-classical’ regime

Begin with skepticism about the headline number.

Jun 16, 2026

Business

Booking.com runs well over a thousand simultaneous A/B tests at any moment from its Amsterdam headquarters, on an experimentation platform engineers built in the mid-2000s and have patched continuously without ever fully replacing, and a single button colour test passed into company folklore as the change that reportedly earned more than its first three years of trading combined

Inside Booking.com's Amsterdam engineering floors, a homemade experimentation framework from 2007 quietly runs tens of thousands of parallel A/B tests, turning fractions of a percent into billions in bookings.

Jun 16, 2026

Technology

When YouTube launched in 2005, the very first video ever uploaded was a 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, saying nothing particularly meaningful about elephants having long trunks — and the video remains live on the platform today with more than 350 million views, as one of the most-watched home videos in human history

Press play and a young man in a beige jacket appears in front of an elephant enclosure, slightly out of focus, mildly uncomfortable, observing that elephants have long trunks.

Jun 16, 2026

Politics

Cambodia stripped Chen Zhi of citizenship in January 2026 and handed the ‘Neak Oknha’ royal advisor to Beijing — not Brooklyn

On a Phnom Penh morning in January 2026, a man who had held three passports, a Cambodian royal title, and a personal fortune large enough to make him one of the country's most visible businessmen woke up as none of those things.

Jun 16, 2026

Mind

The United States keeps roughly 374 million laying hens, and over 60% of the world’s eggs come from cage systems where thousands of birds share the same air, water, and wire floor

The American laying flock now stands at roughly 374 million birds, most of them housed on about 67 square inches of wire each. A look inside the cage system that still produces over 60% of the world's eggs — and the heat, lawsuits, and broken pledges now reshaping it.

Jun 16, 2026

Curiosities

On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper’s team at Harvard pulled a dead moth out of the Mark II computer’s relay, taped it into the logbook with the note ‘first actual case of bug being found,’ and preserved the page that gave software its oldest metaphor

On September 9, 1947, engineers at Harvard's Computation Laboratory pulled a moth from Relay 70 of the Mark II computer and taped it into the logbook. The word 'bug' was already 70 years old — and that's exactly why the joke worked.

Jun 16, 2026

News

The US Justice Department seized 127,271 bitcoin worth $15B — the largest forfeiture in American history traces back to a 2020 mining hack nobody reported

On October 14, 2025, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment and a civil forfeiture complaint that, taken together, represent what the Department of Justice has described as the largest asset seizure in its history: 127,271 bitcoin, valued at roughly $15 billion at the time of filing.

Jun 16, 2026

Business

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and the team that decides how it votes on 9,000 annual shareholder resolutions is smaller than the staff of a single Oslo restaurant

Norges Bank Investment Management runs the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, holds roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and processes 9,000 shareholder meetings a year with a corporate governance team you could fit around three dinner tables.

Jun 16, 2026

Mind

People who were told to speak up more, be more outgoing, and come out of their shell often spent so much energy performing extroversion that they never found out what they were actually good at

She is thirty-four, in a Wednesday morning meeting, counting the seconds until she can say something.

Jun 16, 2026